Breaking D2 language/spec changes with D1 being discontinued in a month

[Max Samukha]

On Wednesday, 28 November 2012 at 08:40:32 UTC, SiegeLord wrote:
> On Wednesday, 28 November 2012 at 08:01:02 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
> wrote:
>
>> I think all this is mostly a project management issue. I don't 
>> think the breaking changes in them self is the biggest problem.
>
> After years of using D1 and D2, I've lowered my expectations 
> about what can be changed for the better with D as long as the 
> current captains are at the helm. You can change the language, 
> but you can't change the person. Yes, ultimately if the project 
> was managed better the code breaking issue would be mitigated 
> for free, but that's not happening. Bad management is one of 
> the invariants of D's history.
>
> Given that invariant, I just want a tiny concession... I want 
> my code not to break with every new version of DMD. If some 
> breaking change must be introduced, I want ample warning, 
> preferrably in the form of a compillation warning or a 
> deprecation message, so I don't have to scamper to fix my code 
> in a few weeks/days after each DMD release, but have the 
> leisure to do it over a release cycle.
>
> A quick aside about D1... it in fact has amazing stability. I 
> recently compiled Kenta Cho's D games which were written before 
> D 1.0... I only had to make a few changes here and there for it 
> to compile with the most recent DMD1. Far less than the amount 
> of changes I had to make when upgrading from 2.059 to 2.060 
> with the D2 codebase I maintain (Tango D2 and my personal 
> projects). With D1 being discontinued, it is clear where the 
> priorities lie... definitely not on stability of people's code.

I have a different concession. I come here on a regular basis to 
see if the issues hampering some long-overdue work that is 
important to me (and arguably to the community) have been 
resolved. There has been great progress thanks to Kenji Hara, Don 
and others but a couple of critical issues still remain (like 
this one http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5380). I 
don't give a darn whether fixing the language and tools breaks 
other people's code. It is *their* code that is wrong and should 
be changed. We should not need to clutter ours with the ugliest 
of workarounds because people didn't care to think about what 
they were doing. If they can't or don't want to do the right 
thing, let them stick to the buggy compiler builds that work for 
them.

>
> And before people come and say that they have thousands of D2 
> commercial code that they don't mind breaking every release... 
> let me suggest that perhaps for every 1 of you, there are 99 
> others who don't care for such nonsense?